When my father died and was buried in a chapel overlooking Portsmouth—the same chapel in which General Eisenhower had prayed for success the night before D-Day in 1944—I gave the address from the pulpit and selected as my text a verse from the epistle of Saul of Tarsus, later to be claimed as “Saint Paul,” to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 8):

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

I chose this because of its haunting and elusive character, which will be with me at the last hour, and for its essentially secular injunction, and because it shone out from the wasteland of rant and complaint and nonsense and bullying which surrounds it. (Source)

The Takeaway: To improve the clarity of your writing, spend at least 10 minutes a day reading aloud from writers who write clearly. You will see, hear and feel the stark contrast between careful diction and the scatterbrain diction (sample here) that besets us every day. The topic you select for your reading doesn’t matter, because you’re reading for style not content. If you would like a list of recommended writers and works, please email me at joeroy(at)joeroy(dot)com. Ask for my “List of Writers to Absorb.” I will respond via email.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Monday, December 22, 2014

Writers sometimes undermine themselves in their titles and introductions. Let me give you a quick example:

While surfing for information on measuring the value of public relations, I saw an article with this title:

“My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys… err… PR Measurement Pros.”

I thought:

He sounds foolish, but I’ll give him one paragraph before I decide whether to quit.

His introductory paragraph:

“Not too long ago, PR News Online published a fun piece about PR superheroes. I loved this story because I’ve always wanted to be a superhero. It made me believe that one day, if I try hard enough and excel in my career, I might be able to gain PR superhero recognition and be invited to join the Justice League… OK, OK, never mind; my kids have me grounded enough to know this is highly unlikely. Though I may never gain superhero status, I have devoted some time to searching for a few real life PR superheroes.” (Links in original omitted here.)

I thought:

His use of fun as an adjective makes him sound childish.

In “I’ve always wanted be a superhero,” he uses present perfect tense, which implies that he, a putative adult, still wants to be a superhero.

He incongruously inserts contrived dialog (“OK, OK, never mind”). Apparently he is unaware how blasted annoying this device is, or how fatuous it makes him sound.

The Takeaway: Remember, intelligent readers judge you by your diction and composition. They do it to avoid wasting time. If they notice that your title or introduction makes you sound immature, ill-educated or neurotic, they (correctly or incorrectly) conclude that the rest of your piece will be silly, incoherent, long-winded, tangential and confusing. Therefore they conclude that you are not a credible source of information and they stop reading right there. So give yourself a chance; build your credibility by using good diction and composition, especially in your title and introduction.

“When 20-year-old Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten was raped, murdered, and mutilated by her estranged husband in 1980, she was adopted as a symbol of man’s inhumanity to woman by germinal third wave feminists (who would have cut her dead when she was alive).

“Conveniently mute, impossible to libel, and as easy to configure as Barbies, deceased women—from Emily Davison to the Montreal Massacre’s 14 engineering students—make the best feminist icons. (Unless they’re Muslim.) The third wave’s anti-porn wing inflated Stratten into an ideological sex doll, into which they poured their loathing of Hugh Hefner and lesser spank-mag deities.” (Precisely 100 words) (Links in original omitted here.) (Source)

“Despite what basic common sense would dictate, we are repeatedly spoon-fed the mantra that we live in a ‘rape culture.’ And despite ample evidence to the contrary, we are told that women never lie about rape.

“Despite the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax and the fact that on any given day you can search the phrase ‘false rape’ on Google News and dredge up countless stories of bitter, scorned, vindictive, psychotic women falsely accusing men of rape, the howling harpies of latter-day feminism and their gelded male worker elves continue to insist that false rape accusations are a patriarchal fiction.

“That’s why the nuclear-reactor-level meltdown of that mossy old rancidly flatulent hippie rag Rolling Stone over an at least partially—and perhaps entirely—fraudulent gang-rape story at the University of Virginia is so exquisitely delicious.” (140 words) (Links in original omitted here.) (Source)

“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.” (120 words) (Source)

The Takeaway: When we write concisely and don’t waste words on circumlocutions, equivocations or evasions, we can say a lot in 100 words or so. One technique for writing concisely is to deliberately write an overlong first draft and then keep reducing it. For example, to write a 2000-word article, I typically write a 3000-word first draft. In successive drafts, I cut 500 words, 300 words, 150 words, and 50 words, leaving a concise, compelling, 2000-word fifth draft. This technique is quicker and easier than it sounds. Try it.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Here’s an informative but also entertaining article titled “12 Horrible Gobbledygook Words We Reluctantly Accepted.” It appeared in mental_floss, a great online source of intelligent humor.

An excerpt:

“In 1883, a journalist named Godfrey Turner went on an awesome rampage against purist, writing, ‘What a word! We have here positively the only instance of an attempt to make a noun, by this clumsy inflection, direct out of a raw adjective.’ He wasn’t done with it yet though, going on to write in another publication, ‘whoever first committed to the legibility of black and white that vicious noun-substantive has, it may be hoped, lived to repent a deed that offends forever against verbal purity … among all blundering conceits of modern phraseology, [it] stands distinguished from its misshapen fellows by an unapproachable singularity of malformation.’ ” (Italic and boldface added.)

You can imagine my surprise when, glancing for the first time at a punchy online magazine called Spiked (the magazine’s owners spell it “sp!ked”), I immediately spotted three circumlocutions in a single sentence.

It was the last sentence of the first paragraph of an article titled “What private schools teach state schools,” by education editor Joanna Williams.

Here’s the paragraph:

As headmaster of the exclusive Wellington College (fees for boarders: £32,940 per year), Anthony Seldon is remarkably coy about championing the privileges of private education. His report for the Social Market Foundation, Schools United: Ending the Divide Between Independent and State, published this week, is his latest attempt to talk himself out of a job through either abolishing fee-paying schools altogether, or eroding any distinction between the state and independent sectors. Seldon’s defensiveness is driven by the fact that private-school pupils are more likely than their state-educated peers to get better exam results, go to the most selective universities, secure jobs in the elite professions and earn more money. (Boldface added.)

Analysis

First circumlocution:

Sheldon’s defensiveness

An alternative:

Sheldon cowers

Second circumlocution:

is driven by

An alternative:

because

Third circumlocution:

the fact that

An alternative:

(Omit these three words entirely.)

And so,

Seldon’s defensiveness is driven by the fact that

becomes

Sheldon cowers because

The magazine’s name and layout are so aggressive that a reader might expect to read Spiked for a year without spotting a single circumlocution, insinuation, euphemism, equivocation or evasion. This reader isn’t going to read any further; life is too short.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

If you love words, you will enjoy author, speaker and teacher Ralph Keyes (pictured). He is the language columnist for The American Scholar, where he writes a column titled “Back Talk.” He has a light touch; he is entertaining, not tedious. In a recent column he discussed the making of nouns into verbs, including those “tortured coinages that end in ‘ize.’ ”

The correlative conjunctionnot only… but also must be used in a parallel construction. In the example above, it is not. One correct alternative would be “He’s not only funny but also intelligent.” For additional correct alternatives, see this page in Grammarly Handbook.

The Takeaway: Whenever you are writing something for publication – even if it’s “just” a blog – present yourself as a well-educated grown-up. Have an experienced editor read your copy; that’s what well-educated grown-ups do.